Where's My Job? Job Search, Migration, and Employment among Young Adults in the Great Recession

• In Event: 120 - Regular Session. Internal Migration

Abstract

Economic and human capital theories of migration suggest that individuals will move from one place to another when the benefits, especially in terms of wages and employment prospects, outweigh the costs. From this perspective, local variations in employment conditions drive migration. Thus to the extent that local unemployment rates serve as a proxy for economic prospects, these theories lead us to expect that, ceteris paribus, individuals will flee areas with high unemployment rates. However, in order to gain from migrating, movers must be able to find a job. We suspect that for young people, uncertainty in how to evaluate information, especially about their own economic prospects, complicates the relationship between job search and migration. This paper evaluates the traditional, human capital-based approach to migration by examining the relationships between moving, job search and employment, and macro-level labor market conditions among a nationally representative sample of young adults. We use sequence analysis to identify patterns in the ordering of employment, search, and migration, and find that contrary to expectations, job search and migration are almost always temporally decoupled. A Cox proportional hazard model shows that migration is sensitive to both employment status and the level and direction of change in local and national unemployment rates. Substantively, we find that young adults are less likely to move when economic conditions are poor. Integrating these two preliminary results, we suggest that while job search may be a theoretically critical component of migration for some workers, it may not be empirically linked to moving.

Authors

• Jennifer Lynn Branstad, University of Washington

• Katherine Stovel, University of Washington